FlowerChild's Dev Diary: Week of September 2nd

[jadedcat]

The optimization thing makes me so happy, its amazing how much work you put into making this not only a fun expansion to minecraft but also into the little things like resource usage that mojang just doesn't seem to bother with as much. You are absolutely amazing at even the nit picky details.

[teh_tetra]

...now to find out where to get those fabled tin foil hats... and learn of their origination.

First, you must travel to the land of Wrap, and speak to a man named Reynolds...

And of course stuff is happening to Enderchests. He even told us what. No need for a tinfoil hat this time.

peh-shaw there is always need for a tinfoil hat

[FlowerChild]

Ok, so now that 4.10 is happily out in the wild, I've decided to go back to SMP related features and optimization .

After getting the Screw Pump finished, I figured it was worth putting out a release so that you guys would have some new content to play with while I worked on the rest of what I have planned.

Today, I've been looking at the rather messed up way in which vanilla deals with item-counts. This is most noticeable with buckets, where you click to retrieve some water, and your stack of buckets either doesn't go down in count, or it decrements by 2 instead of 1.

Moving the stack in your inventory retrieves a proper count from the server and restores your inventory, but it's a pain in the ass regardless.

I dug into the bucket code for awhile, thinking it was limited to that, but it wasn't. It turns out this applies to any non-block item. You can actually get it to happen with eggs if instead of just throwing them at a distance, if you throw them at a block that you are directly pointing at. So, it looks more like it's an issue with having a block selected and activating an item, rather than a problem that is specific to any particular item.

I went through the code hierarchy for quite awhile trying to trace the problem back to its source, but in the end said "fuck this" as it's obviously something that is buried fairly deep in Mojang's code and I don't want to waste anymore time on something that they will need to fix themselves. It's just unfortunate that we're looking at around 2 months before they put out the next version, and I also find it depressing that this bug doesn't seem to even be listed over on the MC wiki, or as being fixed in the snapshots since 1.3 was released.

If anyone could confirm whether it's still happening in the most recent snap-shot or not, I'd be much obliged. If it is, I may bight the bullet at a later date and spend some serious time on fixing it.

Beyond that, I have one lingering HCB issue that I want to take care of next, which is the filling of water bottles from non-source block water. That should just take me a few minutes, but obviously HCB related issues are much more important now given its the primary play-mode of BTW.

Other than that, I've got various optimizations to perform, then I'll probably get onto what I mentioned about player death having more impact.

[Sarudak]

then I'll probably get onto what I mentioned about player death having more impact.

I'm really interested to see what you've come up with... ;)

[FlowerChild]

After fixing a couple of small issues with regards to villager trading of Hemp (see MCF), I decided to also resolve one of my personal pet-peeves with regards to the whole merchant thing. From the change-log for the next release:

-Changed the amount that villagers buy books and paper for, as their relative value didn't make a whole lot of sense given that it was more productive to sell unfinished vs. finished and more resource intensive goods. This effectively decreases the value of paper slightly, while increasing the value of books significantly.

I really wish Mojang would actually play with their new features before releasing :\

[Sarudak]

The distinction between finished and unfinished goods here is kinda moronic considering no actual effort Is involved lol

[darahalian]

But now that leather is involved in the making of books, there is that one thing that makes a finished book more worth more than just the paper used to craft it.

[FlowerChild]

But now that leather is involved in the making of books, there is that one thing that makes a finished book more worth more than just the paper used to craft it.

Yup, exactly. Books weren't even worth 3 times a piece of paper, nevermind not taking the leather into account. Previously, you'd actually lose significant value making your paper into books.

[Stormweaver]

I like it. Combined with the tanned leather high-efficiency recipe, in theory it gets us a nice industrial method of making money emeralds out of villagers without needing weird mechanisms to feed us paper for mass-trading.

[nmarshall23]

My understanding is that Mojang wants players to have to make some bad trades to cycle through to the good trades..

Thanks, FC for once more fine tuning Mojang's mess.

[August West]

My understanding is that Mojang wants players to have to make some bad trades to cycle through to the good trades..

Thanks, FC for once more fine tuning Mojang's mess.

That's a very easy excuse for having bad trades in the system.

[FlowerChild]

My understanding is that Mojang wants players to have to make some bad trades to cycle through to the good trades..

Thanks, FC for once more fine tuning Mojang's mess.

Well yes, but that's not related to this. There's a random factor involved in how much the villagers want to buy particular things for, and that's where you end up with "bad trades" on occasion.

However, the range of values assigned to books just made paper hands down superior for sale at all times. I really don't think that's what Mojang was intending, and I suspect they may have balanced this before putting leather in the recipe...and did a bad job of it even then ;)

[kjbrona]

Well yes, but that's not related to this. There's a random factor involved in how much the villagers want to buy particular things for, and that's where you end up with "bad trades" on occasion.

However, the range of values assigned to books just made paper hands down superior for sale at all times. I really don't think that's what Mojang was intending, and I suspect they may have balanced this before putting leather in the recipe...and did a bad job of it even then ;)

I had a villager that was charging 5 diamonds for 1 emerald. I'm thinking they may have just thrown in some things with no balancing. :/

Thanks for the book change!

[FlowerChild]

Yeah, I can easily see myself doing a full balance pass on villager trading in the future, once I get more pressing issues out of the way. For now though, the books were just annoying the shit out of me as I was finding myself primarily trading paper and books with the villagers in my own world, and it was feeling rather ridiculous that I was always favoring paper trades over books, avoiding converting my paper into books whenever possible, and groaning every time a villager popped up a book trade.

I really think the sensation in that case should be more "sweet...they want finished goods!" rather than the opposite, especially since those trades are a bit more rare.

Anyways, I'll leave the rest for the future, or perhaps do the balancing incrementally based on my own experiences with the villagers, but I don't think "Hardcore Trade" would be too much of a stretch down the road ;)

[Husbag3]

Hardcore trade doesn't sound as interesting as "Hardcore villagers"

[Donzaffi]

Hardcore trade doesn't sound as interesting as "Hardcore villagers"

that sounds more like villagers in gimp suits

[Husbag3]

Hardcore trade doesn't sound as interesting as "Hardcore villagers"

that sounds more like villagers in gimp suits

It's open to interpretation ;)

[walker_boh_65]

Hardcore trade doesn't sound as interesting as "Hardcore villagers"

that sounds more like villagers in gimp suits

Good thing we have the screw. :)

[FlowerChild]

Just a brief update:

Yesterday I largely worked on various tweaks and fixes, and put one additional small feature in the mod which further extends the modifications that I'm willing to make to vanilla behavior to get the kind of gameplay experience I want. Yes, it is fairly safe to assume it has "hardcore" in the feature name ;)

Today, I've decided to work on a problem that's been bugging me for the past couple of weeks. Well, a couple of problems actually: namely that chickens become rather useless later in the tech-tree, and secondly, what to do with the arrow drops that mob-traps produce.

I spoke a bit about this on IRC Friday night, but arrows are a bit of a dead-end. There's not a whole lot you can conceivably make out of them, so in terms of mob-trap output, there's not much I can do to make them useful to the player in massive numbers. Also, feathers are of rather limited potential use as well. Meanwhile, having to breed chickens to make arrows is a potentially cool and interesting mechanic , especially with my recent changes to them with Hardcore Chickens. They now have a unique and interesting breeding mechanic, so what we really need is incentive to breed them.

I tried to resolve this somewhat a few months ago with the inclusion of Broadhead Arrows, and Padding, since you can only craft them yourself and need feathers to do so, but I don't get the impression that people make them in large enough numbers to really inspire anything beyond killing the occasional chicken that you find wandering about, or at best, small scale non-automated chicken farms. Heck, I know even for myself, especially since enchantments were built into the game, I usually just carry regular arrows with me instead of Broadheads. Granted, Broadheads will likely be much more valued in SMP for PvP, but I'd like to resolve this issue for SSP as well.

Anyways, I've been mulling over potential solutions to this problem, and I've finally settled on one which I'm going to start working on today. I think it's rather simple and elegant, which are generally the solutions that I most favor ;)

So, that's the state of the mod on this Sunday afternoon :)

[DxPanxD]

I only really use broad head arrows when I'm going to slay the ender dragon.

For normal gameplay, power IV and fire aspect on a composite bow is enough to kill pretty much any mob with one hit, so I don't really see the need to use my steel on arrows. I suppose in anarchy play that'd be different, as you'd want all the fire power you can get against enchanted SFS.

Edit: >_> Somehow I missed the bit you said about PvP. Sorry for the redundancy in my post.

[FlowerChild]

I just said that.

[embirrim]

Today, I've decided to work on a problem that's been bugging me for the past couple of weeks. Well, a couple of problems actually: namely that chickens become rather useless later in the tech-tree, and secondly, what to do with the arrow drops that mob-traps produce.

Wouldn't re-enabling chickens-tallow be a good incentive? It just seems a bit of a waste to automate chicken breeding purely for feathers, but I suppose that depends on the incentive.

And I just remembered that BD's suck little chickens up to get feathers, so I suppose you're going for that; however that wastes the hatchery part slightly, I mean you can fit it all into a small 5x5 cube or something.

[FlowerChild]

Wouldn't re-enabling chickens-tallow be a good incentive? It just seems a bit of a waste to automate chicken breeding purely for feathers, but I suppose that depends on the incentive.

And I just remembered that BD's suck little chickens up to get feathers, so I suppose you're going for that; however that wastes the hatchery part slightly, I mean you can fit it all into a small 5x5 cube or something.

You read the two rules I posted for this thread correct?

[Sarudak]

Whoa man! A new hardcore feature! I wonder what it is? ? ? ;)

[Syruse]

I wonder if this 'new' hardcore feature is hardcore death, or something that hasn't been hinted at yet. Either way, I'm excited to see how it works. :D